Principal: Mining

The Mining team's role within Technical & Sustainability at De Beers Group is to ensure that mines are designed, developed, and operated to deliver maximum value and allow De Beers Group to meet its strategic, operational and compliance requirements.

In collaboration with Processing and Engineering & Maintenance disciplines, Mining enables tangible value delivery across the business by improving stability, reducing variation, and removing constraints across operations.

This role reflects the consolidation of three previous Principal Mining Engineer roles into one, requiring agile, adaptable, and resilient leadership to contribute to the development and execution of De Beers Group's strategy.

The purpose of this role is to provide technical leadership across De Beers' mining portfolio, ensuring safe, sustainable, and value-maximising outcomes through effective mine planning, technical governance, operational support, assurance, and continuous improvement aligned to business strategy.

Technical Leadership & Mine Planning

• Serve as the Group technical authority for mining practices across Open Pit and Underground operations.
• Provide expert technical support to Managed Operations and Non-Managed Joint Venture Operations across mining, planning, productivity, operational performance, and value optimisation.
• Support development and optimisation of mine designs, mining methods, production strategies, and operating practices to maximise asset value delivery.
• Identify key technical issues, risks and opportunities for business risk mitigation and value add within core mining systems as a process expert.
• Ensure alignment between Life of Asset Plans, medium-term plans, operational execution strategies, and technical discipline objectives.
• Lead cross-discipline integration inputs into business plans and operational execution through the upstream diamond value chain.

Continuous Improvement & People Development

• Facilitate continuous improvement and modernisation at operations aligned to defined priority areas based on monitoring and review of operational performance and reliability across De Beers Group.
• Drive optimisation of mining systems, equipment utilisation, operational performance, and technical standards across the consolidated portfolio.
• Drive people development within the mining discipline across Managed and Non-Managed Joint Ventures, including identifying knowledge gaps, coaching, identifying potential employees, and planning succession for critical roles

Governance, Assurance & Risk Management

• Develop, maintain and implement technical standards related to business level catastrophic risk.
• Conduct technical 2nd line assurance activities and support governance processes for managed entities.
• Review and challenge mine plans, production strategies, capital projects, operating costs, and technical assumptions.
• Identify and manage key technical, operational, and strategic risks, constraints, opportunities and improvement initiatives impacting asset performance and long-term value creation.
• Ensure compliance with applicable mining, safety, environmental, rehabilitation, and closure requirements.

Studies, Projects and Reporting

• Deliver techno-economic modelling of the integrated business plan and trade-off scenarios.
• Maintain the De Beers Supply Strategy, running scenarios and updating it with changes to the business.
• Lead study implementation for managed operations, including tactical transition plans.
• Support Resource and Reserve reporting; review production processes and conduct iterative optimisation of the LoM forecast to maximise the reserve-to-resource ratio and achieve optimum NPV+.